A day after Tesla reported its best quarterly production and delivery results in company history, shares of Elon Musk’s clean transportation and power company shot up to their highest since its public listing and boosted the company’s market value beyond that of vastly larger Ford Motor Co.

Tesla reached $298.56 in Nasdaq trading on April 3, rising by 7.3 percent. That pushed its market cap to a record $48.7 billion compared with $45.3 billion for Ford. At its current level, the youngest U.S. carmaker is also closing in on General Motors in terms of total stock value, which hovers at $51.1 billion. The increase also lifted the net worth of Musk, No. 80 on the Forbes 2017 Billionaires list, to $14.7 billion.

Tesla’s spike came after it reported building a bit more than 25,000 battery-powered Model S sedans and Model X crossovers in the first quarter of 2017, and delivering a similar number to customers around the world. While that’s a solid number for Tesla, up 69 percent from a year ago, it’s a fraction of Musk’s half-million vehicle production goal set for 2018 and 1 million units by 2020.

By comparison, Ford’s U.S. sales just for the month of March were nearly 10 times that of Tesla’s quarterly tally, at 236,250. But the appeal of Tesla since its 2010 IPO has been more about Musk’s vision for a future that’s defined by carbon-free energy and vehicles that don’t use fossil fuels, rather than profitability.

That the company gave out quarterly figures in line with its guidance for the first half was greeted positively by equity analysts.

“This bodes well for the company and should add to recent positive sentiment for Tesla's fundamental performance,” Efriam Levy, who follows Tesla for CFRA Research, said on Monday. “Despite a track record of often missing performance target deadlines, this pace should put TSLA on schedule to meet its guidance of more than 47,000 vehicle deliveries for the '17 first half.”

Nevertheless, Levy has a sell rating on Tesla as its “rich valuation concerns us.”

Musk raised more than $1.2 billion in a stock and debt sale last month to help fund costs related to producing the Model 3, Tesla’s first widely affordable electric car, with a base price of about $35,000. The company also got a big vote of confidence last week when Chinese social media network giant Tencent revealed in a U.S. regulatory filing that it acquired a 5% stake in Tesla worth about $1.8 billion.

Ramping up production of Model 3, which has a waiting list of about 400,000 people who paid a $1,000 reservation fee, poses a considerable engineering challenge for the company. Equity analysts generally have mixed views on whether Model 3 will launch on schedule in the third quarter of 2017 and the likelihood of Tesla achieving an overall production rate of 500,000 vehicles per year in 2018 and 1 million annually in 2020.

Tesla is also still completing its sprawling $5 billion Gigafactory battery plant near Reno, Nevada, an essential ingredient to achieve Musk’s vision of vastly expanded production of lithium-ion cells needed for vehicle battery packs and stationary power storage units.

Meanwhile, he is also pursuing grand plans for SpaceX to send humans into space next year, plotting the creation of a company dedicated to tunnel boring devices and another, Neuralink, to bolster the human brain with artificial intelligence. Oh, and he has to navigate the impact of a new U.S. administration that's pursuing federal energy and environmental policies that are antithetical to his goals of weaning the world off of carbon-based energy.

Yet Tesla’s robust stock performance makes clear that a significant number of shareholders remain confident Musk is up to the challenge of eventually turning the company into the mass-market automotive powerhouse he envisioned it could be 11 years ago.

I write about technology-driven changes that are reshaping transportation and cities from Los Angeles, the U.S. capital of cars and congestion. I've covered global automakers, advanced vehicle tech and environmental policy for two decades, including 15 years with Bloomberg N...